Bury Hope out of Sight
by Dracoisalooker76
Summary: "I shake my head. She hadn't really figured much of anything out except that she was pregnant and she didn't want to be, so she ran from it. That's another thing that she's really good at – running from her problems." The only person Katniss can't run from is Prim. [non-reaped Everlark canon AU] Written for Prompts in Panem, The Language of Flowers, Day 4. Banner by Ro Nordmann.


A/N: Written for Prompts in Panem, The Language of Flowers, Day 4. Hyacinth: "Fertility" _Defined as the bearing of offspring or the ability to produce offspring, this option may also extend to the exploration of pregnancy or family dynamics within the Everlark pairing._

***Trigger Warning**: Graphic description of the hours after miscarriage; illusions to pre-term labor; descriptions of a pre-term baby*

Banner by Ro Nordmann.

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**Bury Hope out of Sight**

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No grave for Hope in the earth,  
But deep in that silent soul  
Which rang no bell for its birth  
And rings no funeral toll.  
-Excerpt from Christina Georgina Rossetti's _Bury Hope out of Sight_

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Peeta Mellark is the only person left in the school yard when I finally decide that Katniss has left without me. I stand up from the ground and pull my bag over my shoulder. In the distance, I see Peeta sitting against the school. He's drawing a flower it looks like - pressed in a book to keep. He holds it up to the light of the sun, his eyes on the three white petals. I know that flower, it's so familiar, but I can't place it. My father used to bring them to my mother when he was still alive. Those and primroses. It's one of the few memories I have of him.

I take one final look over my shoulder. Katniss must be gone. There isn't a soul left except me and the baker's son.

The house is quiet when I enter and despite it being midday the shadows catch in just the right places to make our usually cozy home look abandoned. Like most in the Seam, we don't have much, but what we do have is always arranged in such a way that looks lived in and friendly. Katniss always made sure of that. Even when our mother sat in her chair day in and day out, rocking back and forth with grief, my sister insisted on keeping our house our home.

Mother must be out with a patient, but I had been expecting to find my sister here, preparing for her hunt. She hadn't waited for me after school so we could walk together, so I assume that she had strict plans. Since she lost Gale as a partner last year, she's been going out more frequently for smaller periods of time. Lately, she's been hunting even more. Without Gale, she says, it's harder to carry so much in her bag.

I look for Buttercup and find him sitting beside the closed bathroom door, his tail wagging and his ears pitched. Usually he comes to greet me when I come home from school. Katniss likes to joke that I'm the only one he behaves for but I think that if she stopped saying she wanted to cook him he'd like her as well.

"What are you doing over here, boy?" I coo.

He lifts his head but doesn't make any move toward me. Instead, when I reach down to grab him, he hisses. I can't help the feelings of shock that flood me. Buttercup has never once hissed at me. Not when I had to bathe him. Not when I had to put him outside to find his own food because we didn't have enough.

I open my mouth again, but before I can speak a moan floods through the house.

At first, I'm nervous that there's someone in the house ready to pounce. I turn around but there isn't anyone behind me. The noise clearly came from the bathroom, which means it's either my mother or my sister...or perhaps a patient? Mother would leave a patient if she were needed at an emergency, especially since she knew I would be home from school.

I knock on the door. "Hello?"

No one answers, but just when I'm about to admit that it's my own imagination, another small moan slides through the cracks of the door and into my ears.

"Hello?" I repeat. "Are you okay?"

Again, there is a long bout of silence before finally the person on the other side of the door speaks up. "Prim?"

Katniss.

"Kat, are you hurt? Why are you moaning?"

If I listen closely I can hear her breathing on the other side of the door. It's labored and every few moments it seems to catch in her throat. I stay silent, waiting for her to say something and at the same time thinking of ways to knock down the door. I don't think I'd be strong enough to do it on my own, but perhaps with a chair–

Katniss moans again on the other side of the door.

"Katniss, please, let me in. I can help you if I know what's wrong!"

She doesn't say anything, so I turn around, walking toward the kitchen to grab one of the chairs. If I break it trying to push the door in, well, Gale will just have to fix it for us. I swing it around and get ready for it to hit.

"If you don't open the door, I'm going to break it down."

"Prim, stop," Katniss pleads. "Listen to me. I'm fine. I just...I need you to grab something for me."

"What?"

She sucks in a breath. "I need that sweater I was going to trade at the Hob and my game bag."

I feel my face contort in confusion but hurry to grab what she needs. If she's hurt, I'm not sure what this will do to help her, but maybe she'll let me in when I get the items so I can assess her injury. I'm not as skilled as our mother, but I know a lot and enough to help my sister. Not wanting to waste any more time, I hurry into the bedroom and grab the sweater my sister asked for off the bed. It's full of holes and not big enough for me anymore, but she thought she might be able to trade it for something down at the Hob to someone who could use the yarn.

Her game bag is in the bedroom too, hidden as always just in case a Peacekeeper comes in for an unexpected check. I grab it and run back to the bathroom so I can knock on the door. When I knock, she doesn't open the door very far, just enough to stick her hand out.

"Let me in," I say.

"Prim, please."

I shake my head even though she can't see me. My sister knows nothing about how to treat injuries. Once she walked around on a bum ankle for days before she let our Mother make a splint for her. If she's injured enough to be moaning like a dying animal, she could just end up making it worse.

"I'm only giving you the sweater and game bag if you tell me what's going on. I just want to help you."

Her hand starts to flail as if she's looking for me so I take a step back.

"Please, Primrose!"

In all of my memories I have never heard my sister sound so desperate and very rarely does she use my full name. For those to both happen in a single phrase is unheard of. It sends a shiver down my spine.

"I just want to help–"

"You can help by giving it to me!" she says. She makes another sickening noise, this time more of a gag than a moan. I hear her wretch once, whatever was in her stomach landing with a splat on the floor. That's it. That's all it takes for me to push the door enough to charge in.

Katniss has backed away from the door and is near the metal basin we use as a tub, leaning against it as she sinks to the floor. She's naked from the waist down, blood slick between her legs and on the floor. Her cheeks are wet with tears, but she has her jaw clenched determined not to breakdown. She's holding something in her cupped hands. I drop the sweater and game bag in surprise.

"Get out!" she screams.

In this situation, my mother would go into healer mode. She wouldn't register that it's Katniss. She would just get to work. I can't do that. I can't watch Katniss sink to the floor and curl up on herself without connecting that it's her. I walk up slowly, sit on the ground near her head, and bring it into my lap, letting my fingers dance along her scalp in a way that she does when I'm sick.

I would sing too, but I'm not a singer. Instead I just continue to run my fingers through her loosened braid.

After a while she does break. Her first strangled cry breaks through the thick air like birdsong, beautiful in tone and haunting in reason. The rest come out in muffled sobs and broken words. I hear a few words I recognize – couldn't do it, karma, Peeta – but other than that it is mostly nonsensical. The words she does say don't make much sense to me either.

She presses her hands to her chest, cupping what she's holding to her heart.

"Katniss?"

I don't want to bother her but I'm beginning to grow nervous. There's so much blood and I'm not even sure if what I think is going on is actually real. My sister is very vocal on her views of marriage and children and the like. It feels like a dream – no, a nightmare – to be here with her in the aftermath.

Her tears have stopped and she just stares at the wall unblinking. I continue to run my fingers through her hair and don't try speaking again. My sister is not one for words – they won't comfort her.

I'm not sure how long we spend in the bathroom together. It must be some long amount of hours. It is long enough that I worry our mother will come home and see this and we'll be back to square one. Katniss has finally calmed and if our mother comes it will be nothing short of a disaster.

So I risk the words. "Kat, do you want me to help you clean up?"

She's still bleeding. Silent tears are running down her face. "I need to bury her."

My eyes fly down to her cupped hands and my stomach sinks with the confirmation of this new reality. I reach for the old sweater I had dropped when I walked into the room. I hold it out to her and she takes it with one of her hands, setting it down on the floor beside her. She then brings her second hand back to the other and cradles them until she's set the object of her despair on the old yarn.

My mother never lets me come to births where she knows something is going to go wrong. This is my first time seeing a dead baby. Katniss must not have been too far along, given the size, but she was far enough for the baby to begin looking like a baby. It has a big head, arms with fingers, legs with toes. The skin is dark, reddish.

"Do you want me to get Gale?" I ask.

Katniss's head jerk to me so quickly I startle. "What?" she exclaims. "Why?"

I nod to the baby. "Shouldn't he know?"

"No," she says. She still looks confused but then realization dawns on her face. "I'm not...Gale and I aren't...it isn't like that."

My stomach drops even deeper. If not Gale, then who? The only logical answer I can come to is Cray, but I didn't think we were struggling. Yes, without Gale coming with her during her weekly hunts had been harder on her, but she'd still been bringing in a good amount of game.

"Peeta doesn't know," she says then. "I thought that if I didn't acknowledge it, it wouldn't be real."

Peeta. Peeta Mellark, the baker's son. That's why she was screaming his name earlier. But Peeta Mellark the baker's son is dating Madge Undersee, the mayor's daughter and Katniss's friend. I look at the baby. I wouldn't be able to tell age, but it looks like it could be old enough that it happened before Peeta and Madge got together. That is fairly recent, not even four months have passed, and it is the only thing that people seem to want to talk about at school.

Katniss has seemed perfectly normal lately. She didn't look or act any differently than usual. She might have gained a little weight, but I figured that was from her great hunting outings she'd been having lately. I've noticed my own clothes fitting a bit snugger with Katniss's constant treks to the woods. I hadn't noticed Katniss really, but then again one of Katniss's greatest talents is hiding burdens from people.

I hadn't known about Peeta Mellark either and they knew each other at least enough to be physical with one another. And, knowing Katniss, she wouldn't do that with just anyone. I'm actually surprised she did it at all.

Katniss sits up and looks me in the eye, her gaze heavy and intense. "And he can't know. Prim, he can't know." She looks down at the baby and closes her eyes. "I need to keep him out of the mines. He's safe as the mayor."

Love is weird. What sort of huge mess have they all gotten themselves into? Gale loves my sister. My sister, although she's denying it, clearly is in love with Peeta Mellark. She seems to think he's in love with her too. I know Madge had something with Gale. Rory caught them once coming back from the slag heap and told me all about it.

I look back down at the baby. What was Katniss going to do when this baby was born? How would she hide a baby from everyone? And what about the baby's looks? If it had come out blonde or blue eyed or both? Could she play it off like the baby just had our genes or would everyone know? I shake my head. She hadn't really figured much of anything out except that she was pregnant and she didn't want to be, so she ran from it. That's another thing that she's really good at – running from her problems. Like Peeta Mellark.

Oh, Katniss.

"Okay." I don't talk to Peeta Mellark anyway. When am I ever going to get the chance to tell him? "I won't say anything."

She nods and turns away from me, wrapping up the tiny body in the old sweater. She leaves the face uncovered – I'm not sure if it's unconsciously or if she's doing it on purpose – and she cradles it so gently in her hands. My sister would have made a wonderful mother, even if she always says she wouldn't.

We need to clean up before we go. If Mother comes home to this I'm not sure what will happen, especially if we're not here. Katniss should be checked by her, I know that, but if she comes home to find this without us here she might go catatonic. And we'll need her. Katniss may not want her, but we'll need her. I can't do this. I can't risk doing something wrong when it comes to my sister.

I get Katniss in the corner and situate her. I help her clean and go bring new clothes. We're almost the same size now and I give her one of my dresses, one of the ones that Katniss bought too big so I could grow into it, and I give it to her so she doesn't ruin her own. I scrub the floor. The bathroom looks almost like new when I finish and Mother might notice that, but it's better than her seeing all the blood that makes it look like someone died here.

And, I guess someone did.

We leave through the back door and walk through the alleys to avoid anyone who could watch us from the big streets. Katniss leads me to the fence. I've been over it once or twice with her now, gathering things for our mother, but she never takes me on hunts. We slip through, crunching through the old leaves that will soon be covered by snow. I let Katniss lead the way as I have no idea where to go. Eventually we make it to an old fallen log.

Katniss looks down at the sweater and then the ground and I know she's conflicted about what to do. She doesn't want to put the baby down, but she needs to dig. So I dig for her. I get down on my hands and knees, shoveling the dirt with my cupped hands. It's soft dirt, luckily, or we'd be here for days.

I don't dig very far, maybe if I stepped in it the hole would be up to my knee caps. But it's as far as I can go with the knowledge that the sun is setting and we still need to head back. I look up and Katniss is staring at the hole, her eyes beginning to water again, and I hold my hands out.

"Do you want me to do it?"

She shakes her head. "No."

She doesn't move. She hums a soft lullaby, the one she used to sing to me when I was upset, and I sit near the hole letting her do what she needs to do. While she hums, she holds the baby close to her heart.

"I'm sorry," she says suddenly. "I'm sorry I didn't want you. I'm sorry I did this to you."

"Katniss–"

"I did," she exclaims. "It's my fault."

Then she bursts into tears again. I stand up from the ground and wrap my arms around her, trying to keep the tears from flowing out of my own eyes. That's the last thing she needs. She shrugs out of my touch and while it hurts a little for me I recognize how much this all must be hurting her. I take a step back and give her some privacy.

She kneels down on the ground and rocks back and forth muttering apologies.

"I'm sorry that I couldn't protect you. I'm sorry that you never met your daddy. I'm sorry I took that away from you. He would have loved you. I'm sorry I got scared. I'm sorry I couldn't protect you."

She settles the baby in its makeshift blanket on the ground beside her and starts to dig while she continues to apologize. The tears fall in steady streaks down my cheeks as I listen to her tell the baby everything she would never tell to me. Things she'll probably never tell to me. Maybe she's saying them to the baby because she knows I can hear and knows she'll never say them again.

"Your dad's a wicked one, you know. Not in a bad way – with his words. He knows exactly what to say. Because, you know, I never wanted that. I never wanted to fall in love with anyone and yet suddenly he was there. I don't even remember how it happened really. One day he was just there, baby. I got caught up exactly like I told myself I never was and when I found out..."

She lets out a breath.

"We just...we couldn't. I couldn't. If he knew he would have insisted on marrying me and what would that do for him? It would put him in the mines. I said some terrible _terrible_ things to him, but it got him to leave us alone."

She chokes a little and swallows. The sun has cast a beautiful evening light over the woods. Everything is a blur to me though.

"He's going to marry Madge and that's good for him. He's going to be a great mayor. He cares about people."

Katniss then stops digging, apparently satisfied with the depth, and grabs her empty game bag. She reaches for the sweater and rocks it for a second before setting it down in the bag.

"She doesn't have a name."

It takes me a few seconds to realize that she's speaking to me. I take a step forward and kneel down beside her. The baby's face is still visible through the wrapping of the sweater, left uncovered by my sister. Its eyes are closed, sealed shut and not yet fully formed. If the skin were more of a fleshy hue it would be easy to imagine it was just sleeping. I'm not even sure I'd be able to tell if it's a boy or girl if I did look. But I'll let Katniss keep calling it a girl.

"What would Peeta call her?" I ask.

Katniss takes a breath and shakes her head. "He'd probably insist on a stupid flower to match mine," she says, rolling her eyes but her voice cracks again and I think she's going to start crying. "But I don't even know. How bad is that?"

"It's not bad," I say.

We sit in silence as the sun finally goes down. We are cascaded into the darkness by the time Katniss finally reaches into the game bag to pull the sweater over the baby's face. She then shuts the bag and lays it gently in the hole. She doesn't say a word as she pushes the dirt back into the hole. I watch until she's finished, patting the surface to make it level.

She turns to me when she's finished. "Okay."

"How are you?" I ask.

She blinks once and then shakes her head. "It's for the best." Even in the dark, I can tell that she's on the verge of tears again. "And it's not like she can come back now, so..."

I don't push her to talk as we walk back to the fence. I want her to know that she can talk if she wants to, but knowing my sister she'd rather internalize everything. So, instead of ask, I reach for her hand once we cross back into the district. She sucks in a deep breath but gives my hand a squeeze.

Our mother isn't home when we arrive and for the first time in a long time I'm grateful for her absence. I get Katniss settled into our bed and lay down beside her so we're facing one another when she won't let go of my hand. We're quiet, laying in the dark, with the weight of everything between us.

"When I figured it out, I wanted this to happen," she says, audibly swallowing a lump in her throat.

"You were just scared."

She closes her eyes and shakes her head against the pillow. "I couldn't even protect her," she murmurs.

"Kat, it's not your fault."

She's sobbing when our mother comes home. Mother stands in the doorway and watches me attempt to comfort Katniss. I know Katniss blames herself, but I can't help but share the blame with her. How did I not notice? She has a little bump, not huge but big when you think about how thin Katniss always is. Sure, she spent a lot of time out of the house, but I'm her sister.

"Prim?" she says, once she has no more tears left to cry. Her eyes are so red and dry they look absolutely painful.

"Yeah?"

"I named her Hope."

"That's a good name," I tell her, reaching forward to put a lock of hair behind her ear.

As Katniss finally closes her eyes, the exhaustion too much for her to handle any more, she mutters Peeta's name. It causes tears to flood my eyes at the thought that my sister went through almost all of this entirely alone. She pushed Peeta away when she found out she was pregnant. I can't even imagine doing that. And then not telling anyone else? She labored by herself while no one was home. She had already had Hope by the time I got in there.

I try to think of a world where all of this is different. Where Katniss tells Peeta she's pregnant and he moves in with her and they raise the baby together. Peeta doesn't marry Madge and Katniss actually agrees to a toasting and the baby giggles happily. Maybe she has a brother with the same tow-headed curls or stern gray eyes I'm imagining. And maybe Katniss still loses Hope, but she has Peeta to help her through it.

But that's not the case.

I reach for her hand. This time she doesn't squeeze back.


End file.
